Movies promote smoking among Mexican-American adolescents

December 4, 2009

The more movie scenes of smoking they watch, the more likely Mexican-American youths are to experiment with smoking, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and Dartmouth College report in the December issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

The three-year prospective study of 1,286 Mexican-American adolescents showed the percentage of new experimenters increased from about 5 percent among those with little or no exposure to nearly 30 percent for those who saw up to 600 smoking scenes. The effect was dose-dependent, with experimentation linearly correlated with movie exposure.

For youths born in Mexico, the "dose" of smoking scenes was the strongest independent predictor of experimentation, overshadowing other known risk factors such as having friends who smoke and at least one school detention.

"Parents need to limit their adolescents' access to R-rated movies, which research has shown have the most depictions of smoking," said lead author Anna Wilkinson, Ph.D., assistant professor in M. D. Anderson's Department of Epidemiology in the Division of Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences.

"Movies that include smoking scenes should be rated R, to reflect their potential harm," she said. The World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control includes guidelines for restricting access by using a country's movie ratings system.

Study participants, who were ages 11 to 13 at the start, indicated whether they had seen a sample of 50 movies selected a random from 250 movies that had been previously analyzed for their smoking content.

While previous research indicated that exposure to smoking in movies increases risk in other groups, the team's study was the first among people of Mexican origin, the most rapidly growing subgroup of Hispanics in the United States.

At the onset of the study, 10 percent of the adolescents indicated they had already tried smoking. Another 17 percent experimented over the three-year course of the project. The most powerful response was found among those who were born in Mexico, with fewer than 10 percent of experimenters among those with little or no exposure, on up to 39 percent of those exposed to up to 600 images. For U.S.-born study participants, the effect leveled off at 25 percent among those who had seen at least 400 images.

Gender, age and peer smoking were the most important predictors of experimentation for the U.S.-born adolescents.

"We suspect the greater impact among Mexican-born might occur because movie-viewing is part of the socialization process for those not born here," Wilkinson said.

The longitudinal study was made possible by the Mexican-American Cohort Study, an effort that has recruited more than 12,000 families to better understand factors that influence Mexican-American health. The cohort is funded by Texas Tobacco Settlement funds and M. D. Anderson.

Several recent research studies published in the United States have determined that young adolescents who see smoking scenes in movies are more likely to smoke. To combat smoking among youth, public health groups have called ...

Do young adults learn behaviors from movies? In a paper published in the November issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, examined the relationship ...

Dartmouth researchers have determined that movie characters who smoke, regardless of whether they are "good guys" or "bad guys," influence teens to try smoking. The study, published in the July 2009 issue of the journal Pediatrics, ...

Participating in team sports is associated with a reduced likelihood of youths becoming established smokers, according to a report in the July issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives ...

Whether non-smoking Mexican-American adolescents go on to experiment with smoking depends largely on their initial attitude toward the habit, researchers at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report in the December issue of Cancer ...

Recommended for you

A biomedical breakthrough published today in the journal Nature reveals never-before-seen details of the human body's cellular switchboard that regulates sensory and hormonal responses. The work is based on an X-ray laser ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect a person's decisions in life. Scientists refer to the brains ability to think about the past, present, and future as ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- By implanting an electrode into the brain of a person with locked-in syndrome, scientists have demonstrated how to wirelessly transmit neural signals to a speech synthesizer. The "thought-to-speech" process ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Most people can easily tell the difference between reality and fantasy. We know that characters in novels and movies are fictitious, and we also understand that historical figures - even if we’ve never ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Humans don’t always make the most rational decisions. As studies have shown, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction, sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply ...

0 comments

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.